In a fiery speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate on Wednesday, after President Donald Trump honored the troops that had fallen in the war against Iran, Senator Tim Sheehy (R-MT) gave a powerful rationale for the war.
Sheehy is a decorated Navy SEAL officer with extensive combat leadership experience across Iraq and Afghanistan. His service included leading SEAL Team TWO’s Bravo Platoon in heavy combat, assisting the 101st Airborne, and joining an urban strike force. He earned the Bronze Star with Valor and a Purple Heart.
“Yesterday we saw the president of the United States and many others at Dover Air Force Base presiding over a ceremony that is very sacred to those of us who served, and that is a dignified return of remains from the war zone,” he began. “That process happens beginning in the war zone through Dover to the hometown of our fallen heroes. I participated in many of those ceremonies myself to include carrying friends of mine off the plane. One of those is on this bracelet. He was cut in half by an Iranian EFP.”
“This regime that we are fighting does not care about our partisan politics,” he continued. “They don’t care who you voted for, who you pray to, or where you live. They want to kill all of us. And they don’t just say it; they actually do it, and they’ve been doing it for forty-seven years.”
“This is a war of choice,” he declared. “The Democrats are correct. It’s a war of choice that was begun by a radical lunatic band of terrorists that took over a beautiful nation 47 years ago, took it over with brutality, force, and savagery. And the second they took it over, they didn’t free their people; they didn’t unleash the largest oil reserves in the world to build schools and bridges. They took it over to murder their own people and to spread their disgusting ideology across the world, and that is exactly what they have been doing.”
“They don’t just say it and talk about it,” he pointed out. “You don’t have to believe what they say. You can simply watch what they’ve done. They have attacked families, women, children, innocent people. They don’t just attack them and kill them, they rape them. They skin them alive on camera. They celebrate it. They honor those people who do disgusting things that we would put in jail for the rest of their lives in this country, and they do it for fun, and they pay them money to do it, and they’re heroes to that nation. They’ve done it to friends of mine. They’ve done it to families who’ve been in this chamber.”
Then he crushed the opponents of the war who sit in Congress.
“And the fact that we sit here and listen to elected officials of this country defend these lunatics who want us all dead; they want all of you dead,” he said. “They want all of us dead. They don’t want us to disappear with a snap of a finger. They want us to be raped, burned alive, and cut into pieces. Watch the video from October 7. That’s what they want to happen from Maine to San Diego, from Seattle to Miami. They want this country turned into a burning husk of its former self, and you don’t have to theorize that. That’s what they do.”
He delineated the brutal history of Iran and its allies:
“From the 1983 barracks bombing, where 280 Marines were vaporized in a morning, from USS Cole to the Achille Lauro, to every terrorist attack, from the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas: These are not humanitarian freedom organizations. They are death-dealing cults, and they want all of us to die brutal deaths. William Buckley was abducted in 1985, an American military officer. He was skinned alive on camera by the Iranians. American prisoners of war who were captured? They were never called prisoners of war because they were captured by lunatic terrorists, so they were not subject to the Geneva Convention. They were captured and murdered, power drills through their brains. This is in Iraq. These are families that have dealt with this, and they’ve never gotten a single dime. These families have never gotten restitution, and not a single president has ever stood up to them.”
Sheehy then offered a paean to President Trump:
“Love Donald Trump or hate him, love his policies; hate ICE; love ICE, whatever. There’s never been a single president who has stood up to Iran and hit back. For 47 years, our troops and our families have been absorbing attack after attack after attack all over the world. And their radical ideology does not stop at the Persian Gulf. It doesn’t stop at Tel Aviv. They want to do this everywhere. It’s a global radical ideology, and we’ve been fighting it for half a century.”
“We didn’t start this war,” he asserted. “We did not, but we will finish it. And forever wars are not popular with anybody these days. Both sides love to attack our forever wars. And I can promise you, being someone overseas wearing the uniform, when you’re fighting for your country, you don’t care what party’s in office, but you’re fighting to defend your country, and you turn on the news and see your elected officials stabbing you in the back, telling you that you’re failing, that you’ve failed every goal of the war, is what I just heard. Last time I checked, we’ve wiped these bastards out. An occasional missile strike and boats in the straits, that’s not military strength. Those are the flailings of a failing empire. Those are the flailings of a nation in collapse because they deserve it.”
He concluded, “So I encourage our colleagues on both sides of the aisle, whatever’s politically convenient, whatever plays well on Twitter or Facebook, think about the people who are deployed right now, standing on that wall with a loaded weapon, who have volunteered to defend our country and our way of life. Because they are there defending us in a just war, because we did not start a war with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. They started it with us 47 years ago, and their attacks have gone unanswered for half a century. It’s time to fix this problem and make sure another generation of Americans does not have to fight this murderous, savage adversary.”
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